The straight dope on Italian health and medical care, from an American woman doctor who lives and works in Rome. Her memoir, Dottoressa, will be published in May 2019.

Wednesday, May 2, 2018

Scorecard: Booze

United StatesItaly

Drank any alcohol
during the past year67%84%

Drink alcohol
almost every day6%50%

Liters of pure
alcohol per person per year8.827.56

Alcohol abuse

Men10.7%1.3%

Women4.2%0.8%

Binge drinking in past month16.9%4.2%

Yearly deaths from alcohol per
100,0002.910.37

What’s Their Secret?

By tradition Italians consider wine
and beer to be foods, not drugs, knocked back to enhance a meal rather than to
get soused. When I was first getting invited to dinner in Italian homes, in
1970, the children would be served acquavino,
water laced with a few drops of wine. I’m convinced this non-medical homeopathy
innoculated them against later dipsomania. Those old habits have by and large
held up nicely, but very recently some young Italians have started to imitate
the tourists in their midst by converting to the northern European cult of
Saturday night drunkenness. Let’s hope it’s just a fad.

As with many American phenomena that
favor the all-or-nothing (think Tesla vs. SUV), the United States is overloaded
with problem drinkers on the one hand and teetotalers on the other. I sip my
way through two glasses of wine every evening with supper, more alcohol than 95%
of American women.

Alcoholic beverages are sold in every
Rome supermarket and at every corner store, at all hours. The exception is
before a soccer match if the Rome or Lazio team is playing against an adversary
with notoriously hard-drinking fans, such as Manchester United, in which case
City Hall has been known to institute temporary bans in the attempt to keep hordes
of drunken Englishmen from taking over the streets.

(Curiously, a horde of drunken
Italians is something of a contradiction in terms. Liquored up Romans get
cheerful and friendly, not raucous and rowdy. Turns out the way people act when
they’ve been imbibing is due at least as much to cultural expectation as to the
pharmacological effect of alcohol.)

You’re supposed to be 18 to buy, but
this being Italy nobody at the checkout counter is checking IDs. When American
“abroad” college students catch on, they tend to go off the deep end and can land
in deep trouble – since I’ve lived here a half dozen are known to have fallen to
their deaths out of windows, from bridges, or off walls, and that’s not
counting the cases that have been hushed up.

A small glass of wine every day
throughout pregnancy doesn’t cause fetal alcohol syndrome or anthing else, by
the way, contrary to the prohibitionist terror campaign in the United States.
Every adult Italian you see on the street was exposed to it and survived.

Much better approach. I remember college frat life & the god-awful drunkenness- which was, perversely, admired as a fine way to cross over to adulthood.Still goes on is this heathen (non Italian)culture..Don

About Me

I moved to Rome in 1978 after finishing my training in New York, and have been practicing primary care internal medicine there ever since, treating a clientele that’s featured Roman auto mechanics and British ambassadors, Indonesian art restorers and Filipina maids, Russian poets and Ethiopian priests. When not seeing patients, doing research in psychosomatic medicine, or being the Artist's Wife to my composer husband, I've written a book about my medical adventures, Dottoressa: An American Doctor In Rome, to be published by Paul Dry Books in May 2019.